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I am looking for the origin of the term H2H - human to human, person to person. Who has used it, in what context, I am looking for something that I can quote to use in pitch materials for a community building company.
Hi! Thanks for your question about the origins and use of the term H2H. Here's the short version: TKTKTK. Read on for a deep dive into what I found.
METHODOLOGY
Since you wanted to see where the term H2H came from, I searched Google by date to see if I could find its first online mention in the context you're talking about. A 2011 Chip Conley blog post, which I imagine you're familiar with, seems to be one of the first uses of the term online in the context of human connection in the modern world, though he's coming at it from a marketing perspective.
I also searched around for other authors or speakers that use the term frequently to see how it's being used in broader culture. Since most of what I found around the term "H2H" was marketing-focused, I also searched for examples of organizations or people who, even if they don't use the term "H2H" specifically, try to emphasize human-to-human connection and community building in urban environments.
H2H ORIGINS
The first online mention of H2H in the context of opposition to other kinds of connection is Chip Conley's Huffington Post article from summer 2011. He mentions H2H in the headline, and in the article's text he says, "Amidst the spreadsheets, org charts, and policy manuals, there is a heartbeat in our organizations and it comes from humans. ... The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human." He also said, in a blog post on his own website in 2016, that "all business is fundamentally H2H (Human to Human)."
Another business/marketing personality, Bryan Kramer, is "credited with instigating the #H2H human business movement in marketing and social" with his 2014 book, "There is No B2B or B2C: Human to Human #H2H." He claims in a 2014 blog post that his marketing agency, PureMatter, has been using the term "H2H" for "over a decade." He, too, is mostly marketing-focused, but he advocates for "exercis[ing] our human empathy toward the mistakes and failures of strangers and the people we know" in online communication.
These guys seem like the big two as far as the term "H2H" is concerned, and marketing seems to be the main field where the term is widely used -- other articles I found mostly aped Conley and Kramer's thinking. The term seems to have found purchase in the marketing world because it contrasts against other common marketing buzzwords while also suggesting those deeper feelings about human communication and relationships.
H2H AND CITIES
While "H2H" as a term is mostly rooted in marketing lingo, there are several organizations that look at human connections in urban environments, using the principles if not the term. Modern city design itself works against human-to-human connection, according to the Project for Public Spaces. In the early 20th century, cities started to be designed at "automotive scale" instead of human scale, which reduces human-to-human contact. Architecture, too, can reduce the human element of cities -- research shows that "boring megastructures stress people out" and separate them from each other.
Technology can also have adverse effects on human-to-human communication -- since "only 7% of communication is based on the written or verbal word" and 93% is nonverbal, technology and social media remove a large chunk of humans' necessary communication cues. Facebook especially seems to lead people to build negative self-image and retreat from actual face-to-face interaction.
A few organizations are trying to promote human-to-human interaction generally. The movie "Listen: It Only Takes a Second" is on tour as a community event focused on forming generational connections, letting "youth talk about their struggles so adults understand how they feel." An organization called Sidewalk Talk does something similar -- they set up areas along sidewalks where pedestrians can sit and talk to a volunteer listener.
The growing human-to-human-centric movement focused on cities uses the term "placemaking" frequently. The Project for Public Spaces wants to see a return to more human-scale design to boost community engagement and interaction. They say, "If placemaking is embedded in the planning process instead of treated as an auxiliary feature, the result will be a human scale city."
Scholars at Stanford University are on a similar track with the Human Cities Initiative. Their goal is to "educate and inspire the next generation of urbanists, planners, designers, and engineers through experiential learning and active engagement inside and outside the classroom" in order to "cultivate an ethic of environmental stewardship and social responsibility in how we approach the development of cities" -- basically, make H2H principles the norm in the fields of city planning and urban design. Europe has its own Human Cities Project aimed at making cities more conducive to human interaction through "creative intervention and collaboration between artists, designers, architects, sociologists, writers, philosophers, urban planners and landscape architects."
As Dr. Christopher Boone, Dean of Arizona State University's School of Sustainability puts it, "Whether the goal is to improve the lives of children living in slums in Delhi, reducing vulnerability to extreme heat in Chicago, or reducing inequities in access to information in the United States, the drive to do so should start with the needs of real people, the spaces they occupy, and their lived experience. ... people should be the most visible and highest priorities if we are to achieve the grand challenge of transition to a sustainable, urban planet."
CONCLUSION
"H2H" as a specific term has its roots in marketing. It seems to have been coined in this context by Chip Conley as a response to/play on terms like B2B and B2C, and it was popularized by Bryan Kramer with his book "There is no B2B or B2C: Human to Human #H2H."
The rise of technology and advances in city planning have reduced human to human connections in a big way. The term "H2H" itself is mostly confined to the marketing space, though several organizations and groups use the principles introduced by Conley and Kramer to combat that reduction. Stanford University has its Human Cities Initiative, which aims to educate a future generation of professionals in the city space; Europe has the Human Cities Project, started as a collaboration between artists, designers, architects, and more; the Project for Public Spaces wants to increase "placemaking" -- make cities more human and boost community engagement.